Guy Calaf, photographer and filmmaker living in New York. +1917.288.2731. guycalaf@mac.com

Somalis

Guy was first introduced to Somalia in the foyer of a government hotel in Addis Ababa in October 2006 in a secret meeting with a warlord who was negotiating with the Ethiopian Government to get back into Mogadishu after the Islamic Courts pushed him out of the city a few months earlier. Just one week later Guy landed in Somalia’s capital, still under the control of the Islamists. His first ten days in Mogadishu influenced Guy’s perception of the country’s devastated political situation, opening its doors to one of the most intricate and sadly forgotten crises in the continent.

Guy went back to the city at the end of that year, one of the first journalists to reach Mogadishu, arriving only hours before the Ethiopian military divisions who were invading the country. Since then he has been back to Somalia’s capital twice, focusing on the escalating humanitarian crisis. The crisis, caused by continuing political instability created by constant fighting between the Ethiopian backed Somali Transitional Federal Government and an Islamic insurgency, seems to have no end in sight.

In an attempt to understand Somalia’s social dynamics Guy has worked as well in Baidoa, the country’s political capital for many years, Somaliland and Yemen, where he worked on a story on Somali refugees crossing the dangerous Gulf of Aden to escape Somalia’s hellish situation.

Guy’s stories from Somalia have been featured extensively in Vanity Fair Italy, L’Espresso, Focus Germany, The New York Times and several other major world publications.